As you can see from the photo, Corning's Carnegie library, a block north of its main street, was built in 1914. The photo doesn't show the roofline, but the building mirrors the mission architectural style the community favored at the time.

The city's transportation center, built in the 1990s, reflects the same style. I first visited Corning about five years ago and had lunch at a café at the center. Last month, when friend and fellow Norcal Blogs blogger Greg Fischer and I visited the town, the café had closed. The center seemed more quiet than I had remembered it. When I later tried to find out more information about it on the Web, I discovered that Greyhound bus and Amtrak train service, which once had stops at the center, had been discontinued.

As it moves into the second decade of the 21st century, Corning is both quiet and bustling, depending on where you are. The historical center of town has quite a few vacant storefronts, but five blocks to the west, next to the I-5 freeway, there's plenty of business activity. In effect, the freeway is Corning's transportation center. As in most places, the car is king here and I-5 motorists are provided with all the services they want and need just past the exits.

Another modern-day hub is Rolling Hills Casino, one exit south of Corning. After taking our usual stroll through town to admire the older buildings, we drove over to the casino and had lunch. For the first time in my life, I played a slot machine. Before losing $2, it gave me $4 worth of play. I told Greg I still feel like I'm underage whenever I pass through a gambling casino. Legally, this isn't true, but I notice that most of the gamblers belong to my parents' generation. What will casinos do when all the people now in their 80s and 90s die?

Corning continues to have strong ties to its roots. It's still surrounded by olive orchards. Bell-Carter Foods is a major olive packaging plant. Every August, Corning hosts its Olive Festival. The industry is now transitioning from producing table olives to olive oil, which has become all the rage in cooking. Olives will retain their allure for decades, maybe centuries to come.

In the last five or six years, Greg and I have toured most of the major towns of the Sacramento Valley, to learn about their history, admire their old buildings and sample their restaurant cooking. We've covered a lot of ground, but I imagine there are still places waiting for us to discover them.

My first major tangent was a series on the history of rock music from a personal perspective, which I've just finished. It had nothing to do with Chico. This time around I'm focusing on aging. This topic's only tie with Chico is my belief that I will become an old man here. In 12 years, I'll be 70, so we're not talking about a long time before the transformation is complete. I'm not going to do this as a series. I'll just bring it up occasionally.

By the time I'm 70, I hope to be retired. I'll have plenty of time to write, but by then I may be so overwhelmed by aging that I may not want to write about the subject. Now may be the best time to address it.

What do you do when you retire?

What you always did, but more of it. For me that would mean reading, spending time with my family (grandchildren maybe?), traveling, gardening, volunteering, flaneuring, perhaps running. Those things would be my first order of business.

My last order of business would be dying.

I think about that more than all the other things put together.

Twenty years from now we'll start hearing the media talk about how 10,000 baby boomers are dying every week. Thirty years from now, it will be up to 100,000 every week. Bye bye, boomers. We're a large demographic so it will hard to avoid hearing stories about us in our declining and vanishing years.

But even if the rise and fall of my celebrated generation was not automatically newsworthy, I would still be painfully aware of the reality of death. Every day, I feel its talons digging into me, its hot dragon breath searing me.

Fifty years ago today, shortly after I started the second grade, and just days after I went to school dressed as Superman for Halloween, my mother died.

There she was, sitting up in bed admiring my little brother and me in our costumes and praising the pumpkins we had carved with the help of my dad. And then three days later, she was gone.

The main person in my life was gone.

Since then, death and I have been on bad terms.

Until that point, death had been no big deal. A year earlier, my mother told me my great- grandmother had died. But that's OK, she said. My great-grandmother was sick and old. We all have to die someday, my mother said. I accepted that. My great-grandmother looked so ancient and infirm to me I could barely believe she was still alive. Death seemed like the next logical step for her.

But my mother's death changed everything. This was not OK. This was not only a desertion, but an ambush. Nobody told me it was coming. It wasn't just about protecting a child from bad news. The adults didn't talk to each other either. How do you wrap your head and heart around the idea that a beloved wife, daughter, sister and niece, just 30 years old and with two young children, is dying? My family couldn't. They chose to cling to false hope. You'll get better, they told my mother.

Even on the day my mother died, my dad was unwilling to tell my brother and me what had happened. He sat us down and told us a story about how God had taken her away, and how it would be a long time before we saw her again. How long, I asked? Oh, a long, long time, he said. Where is she, I asked? Heaven, he said. That's when I finally knew. I ran out of the room. I'd heard enough of the story.

My little brother still didn't understand. A few days later, I was the one who had to tell him, She's dead. She's dead.

My mother herself never told me how sick she was. Just a flu that isn't bad, she said. Later, I found out from a next-door neighborhood child that my mother had died of cancer. No she didn't, I protested. Yes, she did, the child's mother said.

Lately, I've been thinking about how my dad said it would be a long, long time before we saw my mother again. Well, isn't 50 years long enough? Where is she? I'm not a person who is blessed with the ability to see dead people, but just a little sign would help. I look for signs everywhere.

I assume my dad was trying to tell us we wouldn't see her until we died. He died last year, so maybe he's with her now. I'm not convinced any of this is true - God, heaven, life after death - but all of my religious impulses start with the hope that I will see my mother again.

In this self-actualizing age, we think of life as a journey. But if death is the end of all of us, and if we must suffer the loss of loved ones we will never see again, what's the point of such a painful journey?

It's 1970. I'm 18 and in my second semester of college. I've just found out the rumor is true: The Beatles have broken up. Now what?

The first thing that happened was that the golden age of rock ended. A sure sign that this was true was that the Beatles' subsequent solo careers were never as compelling as they were when they were part of a group, although George and Ringo were to have moments when they would shine.

The coming of the singer-songwriter movement has been blamed, at least in part, for the passing of the golden age. This theory has been bandied about for decades. For the most part, I buy it. But I need to be a little more specific about what I mean by singer-songwriter.

By the 1970s, most performing artists were writing their own songs rather than interpreting the work of other people. In general, this was a good development. It made the artists' albums more interesting to listen to and more worth owning. It raised the bar for being a rock musician.

But the artists associated with the singer-songwriter movement are another matter.

Musically, Carole King's 1971 hit "It's Too Late" sounds like something she wrote in 1961. The movement ushered in a "mellow" sound that had a tendency to sound cloying and emphasized lyrics that were often trite. As I've already mentioned, I'm catholic in my view of what rock music encompasses. Carole King, Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Harry Chapin, Carly Simon and Jim Croce count as rock musicians. I like them and own some of their albums, but they constituted a quiet, inner-directed, unthreatening branch of rock.

Nevertheless, two of the best rock lyricists of all time, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, achieved success in the 1970s. I don't particularly care about rock music lyrics. Most of it is doggerel . But Mitchell and Cohen were poets whose words were set to music. With Cohen, in fact, it was never about the music. His voice is flat, his melodies are forgettable and his arrangements are schmaltzy. It's all about the words.

Here's the first verse of one of his best-known songs: "Suzanne takes you down, to her place near the river, you can hear the boats go by, you can stay the night beside her, and you know that she's half-crazy, but that's why you want to be there, and she feeds you tea and oranges, that come all the way from China, and just when you mean to tell her, that you have no love to give her, then she gets you on her wave-length, and she lets the river answer, that you've always been her lover."

The mainstream groups that were popular in the 1970s were kind of boring: Three-Dog Night, The Eagles, Kansas, Foreigner, Journey, Boston, Supertramp and Toto immediately come to mind.

Like everyone else who was listening to music in the summer of 1977, I bought Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" album. But its main appeal is its lush, slick production and the sincerity of lyrics that reflect the breakup of all of the five members' romantic relationships. That was the extent of its significance.

Before punk, the only subversive music of the 1970s was glam rock, and even that was more a matter of style than substance. David Bowie, T-Rex, Mott the Hoople's "All the Young Dudes," Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper and Roxy Music were part of this movement, which challenged the dominant hippie culture and traditional gender stereotypes. Many of the artists conveyed an ambiguous sexuality.

There's not much to say about disco, except that I think for many baby boomers the success of that strange side trip marked the end of their willingness to listen to new music. Disco was just too demoralizing. Soon, boomers would become a huge market for the oldies stations that even today give the impression that the 1960s and 1970s happened only yesterday. How weird to live in a time when so many radio stations play only music that was popular 40 to 50 years ago.

The one thing I like about disco is that it was a forerunner of techno music, which I would enjoy 20 years later. But even in the 1970s I was fond of what I would now classify as early electronica: Kraftwerk, Vangelis, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno.

But the music that really kept me going in the 1970s was so-called progressive rock. It has been widely condemned as overblown and vapid, but I am prepared to spend the next blog post defending it and yammering on about it.